Category Archives: Sport

Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities. Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a grounder is primarily an individual achievement. The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game.

Soccer is not like that. In soccer, almost no task, except the penalty kick and a few others, is intrinsically individual. Soccer, as Simon Critchley pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, is a game about occupying and controlling space. If you get the ball and your teammates have run the right formations, and structured the space around you, you’ll have three or four options on where to distribute it. If the defenders have structured their formations to control the space, then you will have no options. Even the act of touching the ball is not primarily defined by the man who is touching it; it is defined by the context created by all the other players.

As Critchley writes, “Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has to play the part which has been assigned to them, which means they have to understand it spatially, positionally and intelligently and make it effective.” Brazil wasn’t clobbered by Germany this week because the quality of the individual players was so much worse. They got slaughtered because they did a pathetic job of controlling space. A German player would touch the ball, even close to the Brazilian goal, and he had ample room to make the kill.

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize.

This influence happens through at least three avenues. First there is contagion. People absorb memes, ideas and behaviors from each other the way they catch a cold. As Nicholas Christakis and others have shown, if your friends are obese, you’re likely to be obese. If your neighbors play fair, you are likely to play fair. We all live within distinct moral ecologies. The overall environment influences what we think of as normal behavior without being much aware of it.

Then there is the structure of your network. There is by now a vast body of research on how differently people behave depending on the structure of the social networks. People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more job opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships. Most organizations have structural holes, gaps between two departments or disciplines. If you happen to be in an undeveloped structural hole where you can link two departments, your career is likely to take off.

Innovation is hugely shaped by the structure of an industry at any moment. Individuals in Silicon Valley are creative now because of the fluid structure of failure and recovery. Broadway was incredibly creative in the 1940s and 1950s because it was a fluid industry in which casual acquaintances ended up collaborating.

Since then, studies show, theater social networks have rigidified, and, even if you collaborate with an ideal partner, you are not as likely to be as creative as you would have been when the global environment was more fertile.

Finally, there is the power of the extended mind. There is also a developed body of research on how much our very consciousness is shaped by the people around us. Let me simplify it with a classic observation: Each close friend you have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your own. When your close friend dies, you are not only losing the friend, you are losing the version of your personality that he or she elicited.

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning.

Second, predictive models will be less useful. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify. Even the estimable statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight gave Brazil a 65 percent chance of beating Germany.

Finally, Critchley notes that soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life.

“Portugal has Ronaldo, Brazil has Neymar, Argentina has Messi, but Germany has a team!”This tweet made the rounds after Germany’s unprecedented 7:1 thrashing of host country Brazil in the 2014 World Cup semifinals. Indeed, the narrative that quickly gained hold-even more so after Germany beat Argentina 1-0 in the final and lifted the cup for the fourth time in the tournament’s history-is that “Die Mannschaft” triumphed thanks to extraordinary team spirit, a triumph of the collective over individual stars.

Yet this narrative is wrong. Germany’s squad was studded with stars. Granted, Ronaldo, Messi, and Neymar are, respectively, the first-, second-, and sixth-best-paid soccer stars in the world, and Germany’s top-ranked player on the list, Mesut Özil, ranks a relatively paltry 13th1but Germany had the world’s best goal keeper, Manuel Neuer; eight players who played in the 2013 Champions League final; and four players who ended up among the 10 nominees for the tournament’s best player award. All of them are multimillionaires and many anchor some of the world’s most prestigious club lines.

Germany’s win was instead a triumph of management. Sound management cultivated a deep and broad pool of stars. And sound management forged them into a team with a mission and a plan. Peter Drucker reminds us that the task of management is to “make people capable of joint performance.”2A key to this, according to Drucker, is a “commitment to common goals and shared values.” “The mission of the organization,” he explains, “has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision.” Since “[e]very enterprise is composed of people with different skills and knowledge…[i]t must be built on communication and on individual responsibility…. All [members] have to think through what they owe to others-and make sure that others understand.” Equally importantly, “management must also enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change. Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels- training and development that never stops.”

The mission-to become world champion-was certainly clear enough and big enough. But it was hardly unique. It motivated all teams, or at the very least the ones with a realistic shot at going all the way. For instance, no other team seemed more driven by the goal of winning the cup than Brazil. One might even say that it became an obsession that ultimately did the team in as the players crumbled under immense public pressure. Important as the mission was, it did not set Germany apart. What distinguished “Die Mannschaft” was a combination of five factors: long-term capability development, meticulous planning, an inclusive culture based on open communication and individual responsibility, competitive intelligence, and the confidence to deviate from the plan when circumstances required it.

Long-term capability development. The seeds for Germany’s World Cup victory were planted a decade ago. In 2004, a mere two years after losing the World Cup final to Brazil, German soccer stared into an abyss when the team was eliminated during group stages of the Euro Cup, having scored only two goals and failed to win a single match. Two years later loomed the World Cup in Germany and the risk of humiliation at home. It was what change management scholars call a “burning platform” moment that enabled sweeping change. A new coach, Jürgen Klinsmann, and his assistant, Jogi Löw, brought in fresh players, modernized preparation methods to stress physical fitness and mental strength, and emphasized youth and skill over experience. “[Klinsmann] risked alienating fans and players alike by turning aside the more experienced players of generations past in exchange for going younger and faster in a competition with a large amount of pressure,” noted one observer. (Incidentally, Klinsmann did the same in the 2014 World Cup as U.S. coach by leaving popular veteran Landon Donovan at home).3 Löw stuck to this formula after taking over as German head coach in 2006. His 2010 squad was the third youngest of the competition at 25.0 years and this year’s championship team came in at 26.31 years, making it the sixth youngest among the 32 teams-Argentina, incidentally, was the oldest at 28.92 years. The ability to repeatedly replenish and rejuvenate the team was made possible by systemic talent development across the country over the past decade led by the country’s soccer federation. Six of Germany’s starters against Brazil were part of the starting lineup that won the European under-21 championship in 2009 (another player on that team, incidentally, was Fabian Johnson, who played for Klinsmann’s U.S. squad in the World Cup). Capability development has not been limited to players, however. Under Klinsmann’s leadership, the team also developed a second-to-none scouting capability that provides competitive intelligence on opponents (see below), a coaching staff that includes several sports psychologists, and a separate management arm in charge of planning.

Meticulous Planning. Oliver Bierhoff assumed the newly created job of manager for the national team in 2004 as part of the Klinsmann revolution. A former German standout forward who scored the winning goal of the 1996 Euro Cup, Germany’s last triumph prior to this World Cup, Bierhoff not only manages sponsorships and PR, but was also the source of perhaps the most visible manifestation of the team’s ambition in Brazil: the team base, “Campo Bahia.” Germany’s soccer federation and private investors invested about $42 million to build a sports resort specifically for the use of Germany’s national team during the World Cup, a facility that will now become a luxury holiday resort. “The Germans just came in and did their own thing,” explained Guto Jones of the Bahia tourist board.4 With a location chosen to be “within two hours flight of the team’s group games to minimize travel” as well as to “allow acclimatization to the weather,5the resort has a soccer pitch with the exact 22 mm World Cup pitch grass length and within walking distance of the luxury villas that housed the players.6 In contrast, “teams such as England simply checked themselves into a hotel in Rio-and then faced a daily battle through traffic for training.”7Fitting every stereotype about German meticulousness, the soccer federation “shipped 23 tons of luggage and equipment for Germany’s stay in Brazil, including mountain bikes, billiards and table-tennis tables, and even dartboards.”8

An inclusive culture based on open communication and individual responsibility. The purpose-built facility not only provided ideal training conditions, it also cultivated the much-lauded team spirit. According to left-back Benedikt Höwedes, “[t]his village has been a major factor in building up the special team spirit in the group today.”9As a German soccer observer pointed out, “The idea of living together in this way has been very good for team spirit. You have your own space but the players are always bumping into each around the resort. It’s different to a hotel where you just have a room.”10It was in this open environment, conducive to communication and exchange, that the team grew together. The team itself was of course already inclusive in many ways. It included players of Polish, Turkish, Moroccan, and Ghanaian origin and thereby reflected a modern and much more diverse Germany. The players’ families and partners were part of the team and traveled to Brazil courtesy of the German soccer federation. And when the team learned that the Brazilian hosts would supply buses and drivers, the squad quickly made its longtime bus driver a member of the equipment staff so he could come along. However, all the emphasis on community never replaced individual responsibility and accountability. Goalkeeper Manuel Neuer’s post-game interview after the quarterfinal match with France was one visible manifestation. Congratulated by a reporter on a stunning save in stoppage time that prevented a goal that could have sent the game to overtime, Neuer first credited his defense with taking away Karim Benzema’s passing options, adding that this forced the French striker to aim for the near post-“and if it goes in there it’s a goalkeeper error,” he concluded with a smile.

Competitive intelligence. Beginning with Klinsmann and especially under Löw, Germany transformed traditional scouting into sophisticated competitive intelligence. The scouting team, led since 2005 by Urs Siegenthaler, compiles detailed analyses of Germany’s opponents, develops strategic options, and prepares materials to brief coaches and players ahead of every game. Even though Siegenthaler and his right-hand man Christopher Clemens traveled to São Paulo to watch the second semifinal between the Netherlands and Argentina, the team had long finished compiling detailed dossiers on both teams and how to beat them. According to Siegenthaler, it is a process that takes months and years; the trip to the stadium to watch future opponents live is mostly so people cannot later claim the scouts did not even bother to go function function function function function function function watch.11The raw material for Siegenthaler’s analysis is supplied by 40 students at the Sports University of Cologne and consists of statistics, articles, and video footage of every player and every team the German squad might encounter. American sports fans are of course familiar with such sophisticated analysis and game planning since it is a pillar of American football in the NFL. And at least since Moneyball, the exploitation of large amounts of sports data to gain competitive edge has become an open secret. But in soccer, a game that only this year saw the introduction of goal-line technology and where a referee continues to decide how long 90 minutes actually is, Germany’s embrace of data, analysis, and systematic game planning based on competitive intelligence is radical.

Confidence to deviate from the plan. One of Siegenthaler’s pre-tournament conclusions was that the climatic conditions in Brazil would make it impossible for left- and right-backs to continuously sprint up and down the sideline, playing crosses on offense and then being back on time to thwart opposing wingers. This led to Löw’s unusual and highly controversial strategy to play with four interior defenders in a line while moving Philipp Lahm, arguably the best right-back in the world, into the defensive midfield. After holding firm through the round of 16 despite tremendous criticism, Löw surprised many when he modified the plan and moved Lahm back to right-back for the match against France and the remainder of the tournament. “I am not immune to advice,” he declared and thereby exemplified the role of management in fostering learning and adaptation that Drucker stressed.

Stars? Yes. Team? Also. But the discernible difference appears to have been superior management-developing talent and brining it together around a shared mission, values, and a plan. After all, in Drucker’s phrase, management “makes people capable of joint performance.” This is precisely what Germany did, and the team’s success could become a case study for the difference sound management can make in hypercompetitive settings.

Brazil certainly underperformed on Tuesday and throughout the World Cup. Its wins have all been lucky, barely, or both. But Brazil didn’t just fall apart against Germany (although it certainly did fall apart). Germany beat them with the precise and inspiring soccer it’s played all month in Brazil. This is not an accident, a golden blessing of a generation of talented fussballers. It follows a 14-year plan to find all the kids among 80 million Germans who can really play soccer, train them young, and get them attached to a professional team.

In the 2000 European Championship, Germany didn’t make it past the group stage. Imagine the anger and soul-searching in New York if the Yankees finished last in the American League East. So the Deutscher Fussball Bund, the organization responsible for Germany’s national team, came up with a plan. Traditionally in Europe, club teams had been responsible for their own talent development. Some, like Barcelona in Spain and Ajax in the Netherlands, have become known for their youth academies. But the DFB decided that talent was too precious to leave unfound, and so in 2002 launched a national program to find all of it.

The Guardian wrote a great piece on the German program last year, or you can read the DFB’s own chest-thumping self-assessment from 2011 (PDF). Germany’s standardized national program starts teaching the same skills to 6-year-olds all over the country. It’s run in every town by coaches who have to get a license from the DFB. Then by age 8, as training continues, scouts are watching for the kids good enough for the club programs.

This spring I watched my German godson, Paul, play a soccer game with his youth team. He’s 8 years old. German kids at that age don’t play herd ball. They play their roles, make clean passes, and pick their shots. None of this is left to chance. His youth club, TV Rodenkirchen, is part of the national program. And standing on the sidelines—for a league game between 8-year-olds—were professional scouts.

Every professional club team in the first and second division of Germany’s Bundesliga now has to fund its own soccer high school. Between 2002 and 2010, the amount that professional club teams spent on youth development almost doubled, to about 85 million euros a year. We can already see what this spending has helped create. Last year’s Guardian article listed them:

Müller, Kroos, Schürrle. These are the guys who scored five of Germany’s seven goals on Tuesday. And Germany’s talent machine is only now just starting to produce. A 6-year-old German in 2002 is still only 18 now. (My godson is pretty good, actually.)

We love the World Cup, in part, because it offers us a clear contest between nations with winners and losers. Except with an actual war, this clarity is hard to come by in international relations. Some nations get lucky. Did Argentina deserve its Lionel Messi or Portugal its Cristiano Ronaldo? But a national soccer team is a kind of mobilization, the end of a long plan, sustained over decades, with many moving parts, to find and train talent.

Germany was not blessed with Leo or Ronaldo. But sustaining a complex national plan over years, and committing to it as both a metaphorical and literal investment? Perhaps we should not be surprised that Germany has done this very, very well.